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With this post I’m starting a series presenting a helicopter perspective of online social media as they stand at the beginning of 2009. My intention is primarily to help those business people who are newcomers to this world to quickly gain some understanding through examples and, maybe, build some personal experience with one service or the other.

Top social media sites in 2008

Thanks to TechCrunch we can have a look at the top 20 social media sites according to ComScore. The figures represent worldwide traffic in November 2008 (total monthly unique visitors). For those who do not follow the social media development very closely I put short descriptions of the sites listed.

Facebook (200 million) is a social networking platform. It is privately-held, valued at $15 billion. In 2007 Microsoft acquired 1.6% of the company for $240 million. Learn more…

MySpace (126 million) is a social networking platform owned by News Corp. Until recently MySpace was the most popular social networking site in the US, but apparently Facebook caught up in December 2008. Learn more…

WordPress (114 million) is an open source blog publishing platform owned by Automattic (New York Times is a strategic investor in Automattic). Learn more…

Yahoo! Geocities (69 million) is a website creation service with blog publishing. From the comments to the post looks like a lot of people are surprised not only that it made #6 but that it’s still alive.

We might want to split all these social media services into three categories looking at the nature of the social relationships between members in each community (the borderlines are very vague, I know):

social networks hosting some form of online identity plus social graphs (that is friends of some sort) of the individuals – the traffic totals ca. 770 million unique visitors/month,

Bear in mind that although the World’s population is 6,700 million, half of the people live on less than $2 a day and only 536 million have access to the Internet from home (hard to believe but here is the source: Nations Online, World Population). Even with this napkin math it’s fair to say that social media are quite popular these days.

Of course, the distribution of the population using social media in some way differs from continent to continent and country to country. But here is a temperature check I learned form my American colleague: if suddenly your mom or dad (for my demographics at least) invites you to their Facebook or send you a YouTube link, it means that there is rampant online socializing going on right in your neck of the woods.